newsgroup web viewer

[Walter Bright]

On 11/15/2011 8:38 PM, bcs wrote:
> You have completely obscured the structure of the news groups. News group (and
> e-mail) threads have a strong hierarchy to them that contains a significant
> about of information that I use when viewing things. As one example, when
> skimming threads, I often only look at sub trees that involve particular
> authors. With your layout, this sort of information is utterly lost.

I agree with you, which is why the D site has never used typical forum software. 
I've not seen one that preserved the tree like structure of conversations. They 
mash them all flat and spread them out over endless pages.

If that sin isn't enough, the other problem is there is no way to mark a post as 
"read". On a large thread, that branches and changes daily, it is pretty much 
impossible to keep up with it without knowing which is new and which isn't.

That's the main thing that sux about Reddit. Try reading a topic for a while, 
then come back a few hours later and wonder what's new. It's essentially 
impossible without reading the whole thing over again. Terribly inefficient.

I hate to say it, but NNTP got it right decades ago. Sure, it looks primitive 
today, but for efficient and regular news reading, it has not been surpassed. 
Not even close.

What I also like about D's newsgroup forums is that the spammers overlook NNTP 
forums these days :-) I'm happy for that. We get the occasional JimB trolls, and 
russian porn spam, but overall it's pretty minimal.

The main reason I did the archives pages was so that google would index them.